[news.software.b] Rrn claiming newsgroups to be bogus when they aren't

alan@sersun2.essex.ac.uk (Alan M Stanier) (12/06/89)

We run bnews 2.11, and rrn. A problem has recently hit us: whenever a new
newsgroup is created, rrn asks if I want it added to my .newsrc, then when
I say yes, claims it's bogus. This happens with any new newsgroup, anything
after line 950 in the active file (which should not be a problem, as we have
MAXRCLINES and LINES set to 2048).

Looking at the code, I find that the problem is in ngdata.c: the call to
findact in getngsize is returning 0 rather than the highest article number
in the directory. I can't get any further into the problem than that. Has
anyone else seen this sort of behaviour? If so, what have I done wrong?

--
  Alan M Stanier    |   tel +44 206-872153   |    fax +44 206-860585 
JANET alan@uk.ac.sx | Internet alan@sx.ac.uk | UUCP ....!mcsun!ukc!sx!alan

coolidge@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge) (12/07/89)

alan@sersun2.essex.ac.uk (Alan M Stanier) writes:
>We run bnews 2.11, and rrn. A problem has recently hit us: whenever a new
>newsgroup is created, rrn asks if I want it added to my .newsrc, then when
>I say yes, claims it's bogus. This happens with any new newsgroup, anything
>after line 950 in the active file (which should not be a problem, as we have
>MAXRCLINES and LINES set to 2048).

>Looking at the code, I find that the problem is in ngdata.c: the call to
>findact in getngsize is returning 0 rather than the highest article number
>in the directory. I can't get any further into the problem than that. Has
>anyone else seen this sort of behaviour? If so, what have I done wrong?

I hit this one and tracked it down about a month ago. There's a
variable defined to be a short which should be an int: ACT_POS in
common.h. Apparently it was never thought that an active file would
get longer than 32727 bytes. Ours is at 39288 and growing slowly...

After changing ACT_POS to a long, the problems have all gone away and
no new problems have appeared.

--John

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